


This House Is Haunted

by rikyl



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M, Mild Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-31
Updated: 2013-12-31
Packaged: 2018-01-06 20:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1111230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rikyl/pseuds/rikyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ways that Christmas Party Sex Trap could have gone differently ... if only.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This House Is Haunted

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to BethofBells for the quick beta and encouragement!
> 
> Title borrowed from Bruce ... as usual. Danny just seems to demand it.

“I really liked my gift, Danny,” she says, smiling up at him, and he smiles back.

 

“Yeah?” He feels warm, ridiculously warm, even though it’s December, and he followed her out here unthinkingly, and neither one of them have coats.

 

“It was romantic.”

 

“Romantic,” he echoes, surprised even though he knows why she invited him out here. He just can’t believe she changed her plan for him.

 

“Did you mean it to be?” she asks uncertainly.

 

“Yeah, well, I mean … I didn’t know if you would see it that way.”

 

“I thought it was romantic.”

 

They smile at each other some more, and he feels goofy and out of place, like he’s inserting himself into someone else’s role here. He knows that’s what he’s doing, but he pushes the thought away.

 

“What do you want, Danny?”

 

Her face is close and turned up to his, her voice soft and inviting, like she isn’t so much asking him as telling him he can have it if he just asks. “I want …”

 

He trails off for a moment, fixating on the way she looks, the fullness of her lips, the snowflakes sparkling in her jet-black hair, the way that sleeveless black dress he likes hugs her curves just so, and he wants to put his hands on the silvery lines accenting her hips. He _wants,_ like an ache that’s almost painful. She’s looking at him expectantly, waiting, her face eerily calm, like she has always been waiting for this. ( _Has she? He wants to think she has, but he’s not sure it fits, considering._ )

 

He thinks of all the movies she likes. Of the certain scenes that he catches her watching again and again in the doctor’s lounge, the ones he always tries to look away from but gets dragged into watching with her anyway. He can see the twist of longing on her face when she’s slumped on the couch with her head cocked to one side, oblivious to him, watching some guy say flowery things to some other woman. And he wants to be what _she_ wants.

 

“I want to go to the movies with you,” he says, inspired. Her face lights up a little, encouragingly, and he goes with it. “Er, to watch movies with you, or, you know, get a drink sometime, some dinner …”

 

All the couply stuff, basically. The stuff couples do.

 

He’s botching this, he knows, because he can’t remember the exact lines from the movie, and he doesn’t even like Tom Hanks, but somehow this sounded better coming from Tom Hanks.

 

“Tonight, the next night … and the _next_ …”

 

That’s not the line at all, he knows, but he’s having trouble saying the next part.

 

“ … for … as long as we both …”

 

The words are sticking in his throat. There’s a dog here suddenly, and he can’t remember why there’s a dog. Is it Morgan’s dog? Is it Tom Hanks’s dog?

 

He can’t do it.

 

It’s bullshit. It doesn’t sound like him. It sounds like some movie bullshit. You can’t promise something like that to someone, like you already know how it’s going to end, or not end, from the very beginning, and if that’s what she wants—fuck, he realizes that’s what _he_ wants—

 

But it’s too late, the scene is already falling apart. The dog is gone. It’s not snowing. And she’s not wearing the black dress, the one he likes, she’s wearing a different dress, something that has long sleeves that’s blue or green, he can’t remember exactly, except that it isn’t the least bit for him, and he can’t make out the details because it’s far away.

 

Because _she_ is far away.

 

Because none of this happened.

 

At least, it didn’t happen like this.

 

\--

 

Danny shakes his head and sets the bottle on the carpet. It’s mostly empty and is probably going to topple over on the uneven surface, spilling the rest, but he can’t bring himself to care. His life is messy and stained now, and all the stains are her fault.

 

He’s slumped against the bureau in his bedroom, his back pressed against the far right side because he can remember a time when she was sitting here next to him on the left, and he can’t help leaving the space open for her, like she might wander in at any moment and sit down next to him again.

 

It feels like it could happen. She’s like that these days, always hovering, omnipresent, within reach, somehow unreachable.

 

He misses her even though she’s not really gone. She’s exactly where she has always been, always with some other guy. Nothing has changed. It’s status quo.

 

But it feels different.

 

It should have been different. If he’d followed her. If she’d waited for him. If everyone else would just fuck off for ten minutes, give them ten minutes to figure themselves out.

 

He thinks of the movie again, the _if I hadn’t been X, and if you hadn’t been Y, and things had just happened differently_ of it all.

 

He had pictured this night going down so differently. If only—

 

\--

 

He’s putting the finishing touches on Monticello in the hot-pipe room and thinking back to the previous year’s Christmas party, the way she lit up at the sight of him, so happy, so impressed by something he did.

 

It was back before he even knew he wanted her to look at him like that. Then again, he made the house in the first place, which seems to suggest that he knew, somehow, even when he didn’t know.

 

He wants her to look at him like that now. Like she’s seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time, like he’s holding something she wasn’t expecting but is just now realizing she wants after all.

 

It’s silly, he knows, he can’t really expect a reaction like that again, but he keeps piping away, filling in the details, because he has to try, and he knows it will at least make her smile, and he wants to see her smile.

 

When he opens the door, he can hear Betsy and Mindy out in the lobby.

 

“But we always have a Christmas party,” Betsy is saying.

 

“I don’t know, Betsy, I guess I’m just not feeling in the mood this year,” he hears Mindy say as he makes his way down the hall.

 

“That’s weird,” Betsy says. “But you’re always—”

 

“Not this year, okay? I have no one special to share the holidays with. Why even bother?”

 

“But that’s not—”

 

Betsy keeps talking, something about the meaning of Christmas or whatever, but Danny’s not listening anymore.

_No one special_ , he thinks to himself, relieved all over again that her crush on that other guy had never amounted to anything. Maybe there was never really much to it in the first place. _The window is open_ , he can hear his brother encouraging him. _You have to try something_.

 

When he rounds the corner, Mindy’s back is to him, and it’s Betsy’s face he can see transform from slight disappointment to surprise.

 

Mindy turns around as if in slow motion as he stands there, feeling self-conscious and hopeful. There’s music playing suddenly, something instrumental, and Betsy vanishes from the room. Mindy’s wearing the same red dress she had on at last year’s Christmas party, even though it’s not really something she wears to work. Her eyes widen and her mouth drops open.

 

“Danny!” she squeals, and she looks like she wants to hug him, but he’s holding this big thing, and so he just sort of shrugs, grinning.

 

“You like it?” he asks, and she beams.

 

It’s the end of the day, and he carries it to her apartment for her. She’s smiling a lot and brushing up against his arm maybe more than usual, and she’s listening intently as he tells her about what sugars work best for structural integrity.

 

After they arrive, he sets it up on her table for her, and when he turns around they have one of those end-of-first-date moments where it feels like they might kiss but neither one of them is making a move.

 

“That’s not really your Secret Santa present,” he says, setting up his phone and taking off his jacket. “I have something else for you.”

 

He notices belatedly that they’re not in her apartment; they’re in his apartment, where he practiced this so many times, and he has to look back to make sure she’s still there. She’s there, but she’s in her office, sitting on the floor instead of leaning against her dining room table.

 

He turns the song on and starts rolling up his sleeves like he practiced, and glances around for Monticello. It’s not anywhere.

 

There’s a horrible sinking feeling in his stomach, the feeling of hours of planning and work collapsing, and he misses his cue.

 

She’s watching him expectantly, but he can’t move.

 

\--

 

Danny is lying on his side on the carpet, his legs curled into his chest to make himself smaller. Aaliyah is playing, and he can’t remember turning it on, but then he notices his phone on the floor near his arm, so he must have started the song at some point.

 

When it ends, it starts right back up again. He should shut it off but he’s apparently in a mood to torture himself, so he lets it go, mocking him on repeat. Eventually he pulls himself up onto his knees and crawls to the bathroom, where he manages to stand up long enough to splash some water on his face. He winces away from his reflection in the mirror.

 

It’s far from the first time he has imagined this version of events since he first pulled Mindy’s name out of the Secret Santa hat, although the details varied. Sometimes, when he was being more realistic, Mindy would roll her eyes when he rambled about icing technique. Sometimes, when he was feeling less optimistic, she would light up over his gingerbread construction but it wouldn’t mean anything more than that, like last year. Tonight, at his most bitter, everything goes perfectly, taunting him with what might have been.

 

Whatever the details, though, the fantasy had always fallen apart somehow at the dancing. No matter how much Richie tried to prop him up and encourage him, he could never quite picture going through with this goofy routine, or if he did, he couldn’t picture it ending in anything but awkwardness or humiliation. It wasn’t that he wasn’t planning on doing it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hoping for it to turn out well. He just had trouble picturing it.

 

Now he has trouble picturing it because it happened, and he’s still struggling to process how it turned out. It had been both so much better and so much worse than he had thought it could be.

 

Everything had gone perfectly at first, even with the circumstances pushing his expectations way down to _maybe this will make her_ _smile_.

 

It hadn’t just made her smile. It had made her smile at _him_. It was the fantasy gingerbread reaction, magnified tenfold. He was going to kiss her. She was going to kiss him back, he thought.

 

If only—

 

\--

 

“I _loved_ it.”

 

 “You liked it?”

_She loved it_ , the words reverberate between his ears like a daydream, his adrenaline still pumping from the dance.

 

She nods, her eyes shining. It isn’t the gingerbread reaction he’d been going for, exactly. It’s less dramatic, less big. More personal, more emotional. It’s _better_.

 

Before he can process it, she wraps her arms around him, and he instinctively hugs her back. It doesn’t feel like a hug, though, not like any hug they’ve ever shared. He could swear it’s more than that—an embrace.

 

She is pressed against him, her cheek warm against his own, and she is swaying a little, almost like they are slow dancing, very closely.

 

He can hardly breathe. He thinks if he closes his eyes she’ll disappear. He hopes she doesn’t notice he’s sweating.

 

When she pulls away, she slides her hand across his back like a caress, and he knows before he knows that she’s not really pulling away. Not far.

 

Then her face is inches from his, and she’s looking up at him with sparkly eyes, calmly, expectantly.

 

He feels frozen. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy, not when everything else had been so hard. She’d never looked at him like this. She’d never seemed to want him like this. A moment ago, she was crying on the floor about someone else. But it’s like a switch has been flipped, the exact switch he'd been trying to flip, and now she is, she’s looking at him, like she wants him, like she wants him to kiss her.

 

The air is practically singing with tension, and somewhere in the distance, he could swear an orchestra is starting to tune up.

 

He hesitates. It feels surreal, like something his subconscious has willed into being. He’s sure there’s a catch, there’s another shoe that’s going to drop any moment now.

 

Mindy’s going to realize who he is, who they are. She’s going to freak out, either this second or tomorrow morning or the next.

 

The door’s unlocked, and someone is going to come bursting through the door to ruin it.

 

Somewhere, something horrible is happening to Monticello.

 

But none of that happens.

 

This moment is suspended in time, uninterrupted.

 

And still, Mindy is looking up at him, calmly, expectantly. At _him,_ specifically at him, like he’s not just anyone to her, he’s himself. He’s looking back at her, at her eyes, at her mouth, at her existence, but he’s frozen.

 

And nothing happens.

 

\--

 

He’s on the bathroom floor now, clinging to a bottle of dandruff shampoo that he doesn’t remember picking up. It feels significant, in a way that bottles of hair products never really are.

 

He’d once thought she disliked him a lot more than she actually did. A lot had happened since then.

 

Maybe it was possible she liked him more now than he knew.

 

Or maybe she’d just sucked way too much wine out of her bra and he was _there_. (Fucking Jeremy for putting the idea in his head. He wasn’t Peter looking to get laid, he was … anyway, it wasn’t _like_ that.)

 

Now he’d never know. He’d missed his chance. Or rather, his chance had been taken away from him.

 

Fucking Peter. Fucking Cliff.

 

Fucking Mindy going off with Cliff, ten minutes after she’d looked at him like that.

 

He flings the bottle back into the general area of the shower and goes out to the kitchen, to get himself a bottle of something useful. Something he can really lose himself in.

 

\--

 

He wakes up to the smell of something burning.

 

Following the smell out to the kitchen, he finds Mindy, attempting to cook something. She’s standing over the stove, wearing his button-down shirt from last night and no pants, her bare legs shiny in the morning sunlight. She smiles sheepishly at him, biting her lip, her eyes enormous behind her glasses.

 

He wants so badly to go to her, to wrap her up in his arms and push his head into her hair, to make them breakfast and carry her back to bed, where he doesn’t remember her ever being.

 

It strikes him suddenly that there’s something off about that, that she’s here, in his kitchen, wearing his shirt and nothing else, and he doesn’t remember how they got to this point.

 

He tries to move, to prove to himself that she’s real, she’s really there, but he’s stuck, the way you sometimes become frozen in a dream. And that’s it, he knows, it’s a dream. All he can do is stay very still and try not to wake up from it.

 

The thing is, it feels so much like something that could have happened— _if only, if only_ —that it’s a nightmare instead.

 

\--

 

He wakes up to the smell of something burning.

 

His head is throbbing but he pushes his eyes open enough to notice a cigarette burning a hole through his bedspread. He doesn’t remember lighting it. He snuffs it out and drags himself into a sitting position, squinting against the harsh morning light.

 

He’s the one wearing his button-down shirt and no pants, and he knows there’s no one in the kitchen. He stumbles out anyway, just to make sure.

 

It’s empty. Echoingly, decisively empty.

_If only, if only_.

 

He stares at the stove for a long moment, bracing himself against the wall, and then goes back to bed.

 

He doesn’t want to be awake if this is what’s real.

 

\--

 

Danny doesn’t see or hear from her again until Monday morning, when he drags himself into the office even though he’s still hungover and generally more of a mess than maybe he should be over losing something he’s never really had.

 

He thinks of all the times they’ve been out together that didn’t count and wonders why they never counted. Why she never once looked in his direction and thought _yeah_ , _maybe_. Why he was always invisible until suddenly he wasn’t, when she saw him, but only for a minute. It was worse than not seeing him at all.

 

She’s in the lobby when he walks in. She has haunted his thoughts so much since the party, it feels like seeing a ghost.

 

He wishes he could be invisible again.

 

“Still feels weird in here,” Morgan says, sniffing the air before wandering away. “Maybe it’s a poltergeist.”

 

Mindy glances sideways at Danny, a lot of things flickering across her features so quickly that he doesn’t really catch them all. (Guilt? Concern? _Hurt?_ He’s tired and he must be seeing things.)

 

“Hey,” she greets him after her hesitation.

 

“Hey,” he manages, trying to be as normal as possible.

 

It doesn’t feel like he’s seeing things. He feels like he’s missing things. He’s been over it in his head so many times, but seeing her reminds him that there are pieces of it that are only hers, and he can’t ask her about any of them because she’s with Cliff.

 

He’s not completely sure he’d ask her anything even if there wasn’t a Cliff, and the realization churns his stomach with something new to add to his self-loathing.

 

“How was your weekend?” she chirps at him.

 

“Great,” he manages, wincing as the exertion of speaking makes his right eye bulge and throb. “I, uh, I think I may have overdone it at the party.”

 

It’s an obvious lie since the party was dry … and was two days ago.

 

“Oh.” She looks disappointed for some reason, and again, he feels like he’s missing something.

 

“You?”

 

He doesn’t want to hear about Cliff. _Please don’t say anything about Cliff_.

 

“Great! Yeah. You know.” She shrugs vaguely. She's protecting him. He is both grateful and mortified.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Okay then.”

 

“Okay.”

 

It’s excruciating, and finally, he escapes to his office, where he can hide from the monstrous elephant in the room.

 

Who is he kidding? There’s a whole fucking menagerie between the two of them now.

 

He finds his bottle of Advil in a drawer and pops three, swallowing them dry. His first patient isn’t until 9, and usually he’d use this time to do paperwork, but today he just lays his head on his desk. With his ear pressed against the surface, he can hear the building’s HVAC system humming, amplified somehow through the wood, and the dull sound is almost comforting.

 

But as soon as he closes his eyes, a version of the night of the party starts playing, and he lets out a groan, because he can’t seem to make it stop, only suddenly it’s different.

 

It hits him, the something he’s been missing, and he realizes this is a whole new version that he hasn’t been over a dozen times already.

 

This is worse.

 

He knows how everything could have been different. Or rather, how they could have been exactly the same, but different in one specific way that he could have actually controlled. If only—

 

\--

 

Clearly, Mindy’s into the other guy. She’s said as much, more than once, and she’s planned this whole ridiculous party to that end, but Danny’s not sure how much it matters. She barely knows him, right? He’s just some guy. She’s always fixating on some guy, and it never works out, and this one apparently didn’t even show up. Or showed up, and left, or something.

 

So he carries on with his own plans, which are not so much woman-catching plans as … just plans. Gestures. Gestures that are open to interpretation, depending on how she wants to see them. It’s different. He’s not contorting himself into something he’s not. He’s not luring her into anything through deception. He’s just casting himself in a different light, one that, yeah, maybe, he thinks will be appealing to her, specifically.

 

He puts the finishing touches on Monticello, humming that dreadful Aaliyah song that somehow makes him smile now, as he thinks of how it will make her smile.

 

If he goes through with that part. The idea of the dancing still makes him nervous, and he’s not completely sure he’ll have the nerve to go through with it. It’s cheesy. It’s ridiculous. It’s … not like anything he’s ever done before.

 

He thinks she would like it, though. He thinks he’d make a fool of himself but that she’d really like it.

 

She goes through with her own plan, and it fails, spectacularly, which isn’t a surprise to him, but it seems like it is to her, and he wonders if maybe this isn’t his night after all.

 

When he finds her, she’s heartbroken, or at least claiming to be, but when he talks to her, her pride seems more wounded than anything.

 

He has a burst of affection for her as she’s huddled on the floor, weepy and discouraged, for the lengths she’s willing to go for something she wants, for the extent she’ll risk making a fool of herself in the process. Not many people would do that, but she puts herself out there, all the time, always trying again.

 

He’s not sure anyone’s ever really done that for her.

 

Suddenly he knows what he has to do. Forget the backup bottle of perfume he has in his closet at home. He’s doing this.

 

“I think I have something that will cheer you up … from your Secret Santa.”

 

So he dances for her, and it’s terrifying but exhilarating. He feels stiff and self-conscious at first, like he’s getting the moves right but only technically, and she's looking at him like he’s insane. But then she smiles, and he bursts into a grin and loosens up, throwing himself into it and committing, the way she would do. And he’s having fun. He likes doing it for her.

 

Not that he wasn’t right about the other thing. As soon as the music stops, the awkwardness and humiliation settles over him immediately, and he tries to play it off as fast as he can.

 

She doesn’t let him. She closes the distance between them, reassuring him and throwing her arms around him before he can second-guess himself too much. She's always saving him from himself.

 

Before he really knows what’s happening, they’re embracing. Her hand slides across his back like a caress, and then they’re having a moment. The way she’s looking at him … she wants him to kiss her. This is happening.

 

He hesitates, just for a split-second, not long enough to really think any of this through, and in that fateful instant, someone bursts through the door.

 

It’s Peter, yelling something about Mindy’s wine bra. There’s another split-second where Danny doesn’t want to let go of her, even though they’ll be caught, Peter’s here, he’s going to notice …

 

He’s about to let go and step away to save face, but at the crucial moment … he just doesn’t. Peter stops short of grabbing at Mindy’s boobs, confused, and Danny holds onto her waist more tightly. She blinks at him in surprise, but she doesn’t step away either.

 

In the next instant, Jeremy comes through the door, and out of the corner of his eyes Danny can see Monticello in pieces, but he ignores it. It turns out he doesn’t even need Monticello. She looked at him anyway.

 

She’s _looking_ at him anyway.

 

Morgan shows up, shouting something about cinder blocks, and he holds on.

 

He ignores them all, and he kisses her anyway.

 

He’s kissing her, because in that moment, none of the rest of it matters. Cliff, he’s just some guy who she barely knows. And Peter and Morgan … who cares what they see? And Jeremy … fuck it, he’ll make her another one. He’ll make her a hundred gingerbread houses if only it can happen like this.

 

Mindy is kissing him. And maybe she’ll regret it a minute from now or a day from now, but maybe she’ll be burnings eggs in his kitchen the next morning, pantsless, looking like she belongs there and she knows it.

 

He kisses her anyway.

 

And just this one tiny alteration, it changes everything.

 

Or at least, it could have changed everything, if it had happened that way. 

\--

 

He’s in his office, alone, and the tears are streaming down his face, the first he’s cried since the party. The first he’s cried since … well, to be honest, the first since last week, when the bagel place on the corner changed ownership, but still. He loved those bagels.

 

He should have just kissed her. He wishes it had happened like that. He knows it’s his own damned fault that it didn’t. No one else’s.

 

He wonders if it’s too late.

 

He wonders what would happen if he went to her right now, before things got too far with Cliff, and told her that he loves her. Just so that she would know.

 

He’d barely admitted to himself, but here he is crying, which is pretty incriminating, and what does he have to lose anyway? He’s a mess, and things are weird and awkward anyway, and it can’t possibly get any worse. At least he’d be able to stop all the _what ifs_ , the _if onlys_ —

He closes his eyes a moment and just wonders.

 

\--

 

When he walks into her office and shuts the door behind him, she looks up at him, startled. Hopeful, maybe, or maybe he’s just seeing things. It doesn’t matter.

 

“Hey, I thought you should know … I know this is a few days late and whatever, maybe it’s not too late, maybe it is, but anyway it’s up to you … if the window’s still open …”

 

She’s gotten up and circled her desk so that she’s standing in front of him, near the spot where they were … _when_.

 

He pauses to take a deep breath.

 

She’s looking up at him, calmly, expectantly, and he just says it, because it's the truth.

 

“I think you should know that I love you. I’m … that I’m in love with you.”

 

A smile spreads across her face, and she is beautiful.

 

There are snowflakes sparkling in her jet-black hair.


End file.
